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Gordon Rekcikssa
...It allows a fantastic body of work to be heard by people that otherwise never would have done so. And a good number of those people go on to search out his other songs, and some of them even pay for them after that. How is it a bad thing that an artist is making at least some royalties where there otherwise would have been none? So I admire DJs that do creative things with this music, and I say fuck the system that tries to screw them over like that. I hope that folks continue to set up sites that support and bring attention to a vibrant and, in my humble opinion, essential DJ culture that is breathing new life into some artist's work that may otherwise be forgotten.
Good words, man that's the truth.
I agree, if it was not for the DJ, there'd be no Hip Hop for another example.
The site was a nice place for up and coming DJs along with veteran DJs to "permanently" store all the mixes they wanted that they made. They could choose to make them downloadable or not, free or paid for downloads. They had a rule that you had to include a track listing for at least 10 songs but there was nothing from stopping you from saying "Artist - I'm Not Telling - Song You should Know this song!"
Frequently DJs who didn't want to reveal their hoarded knowledge songs did just that, filled in gibberish. Then they put a little Amazon link next to each song title saying "Buy on Amazon!" which took you to Amazon. I think that was their way of saying, "look at as we're promoting the artist sales!" But it was too little too late to appease the ones doing the suing.
The way I see it is this, if you are blending 2 songs (or more) together it becomes something else and even if you split the tracks up you'll hear parts of the blend at both the intro and outro of the song. It's not like you can take that "song" and enjoy it on it's own, you'll hear an abrupt intro with an overlapping song you don't understand and at the end of the "song" it'll have a anticlimactic blend into silence.
Once the DJ does his or her job blending songs what is left is nothing some kid can just download and break off that one song for the Taylor Swift remix. (I bet she's behind this!
) So the record people should have no problem with that whatsoever. The kid will still have to download the song at Itunes to get the unedited song in that case and the kid was exposed to it and he didn't know it was out there till he heard that mix.
But there was nothing to stop people from doing 3 second gap unmixed compilations either but that's really not DJing, that's selecting, that's play list making, anyone can do that, and did. I think that's where they got into trouble, there was no quality control agent that distinguished between kids posting their playlist online for all to download and real DJs promoting the music and their ability to spin.
But, it's gone now. I personally housed 10 or so mixes there exclusively. I'll have to reupload them somewhere else if I can find them.
BTW, I have downloaded 50+ mixes from the various individual DJs of the Beat Junkies, and I'll bet I never got around to downloading at least 100 more of them that were ONLY on mixcrate. So that right there alone is a huge loss, we'll likely never have access to those mixes again.
I downloaded probably hundreds of DJ mixes from Techno, to Drum and Bass, to Hip Hop, to Funk, you name it. Every day I work out to some Drum and Bass mixes I got there, now POOF! GONE
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analogoddity
Mixcrate was great because you could DL an mp3 from the site for offline use, something you can't do in mixcloud it SoundCloud unless you rip them with a program.
Right, you can download some mixes from mixcloud and soundcloud but not very many. Personally I prefer Soundcloud over Mixcloud it's just a cleaner app on the phone, there are still some heavy hitters DJs featured there like Dieselboy for example, but with Soundcloud if you want to house more than one mix you gotta pay a professional price, for each mix, it's probably fair, but there was no fee for Mixcrate. Mixcloud I just don't use very often it's not bad by any means but I'm not into it enough to comment. Downloading from either one of the "cloud" sites is a pain if it doesn't have a link but you can use software to slowly record as it streams which is a pain in the ass.
I'll keep using Soundcloud, they got a lot of money behind them so they can probably deal with removing music on a lawsuit threat basis, but who knows if they can maintain through some potentially rocky looking legal territory ahead.
“Lesser artists borrow... great artists steal.” - Igor Stravinsky
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